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The Future of English Online

February 11, 2009 By 2 Comments

Guest blogger and multilingual SEO expert Greig Holbrook, MD of Oban Multilingual, on the future of the English language online. In this post, he explains how English is going to change and adapt to its cultural surroundings, and why we may one day not even understand our own language…

The English language is changing. The internet is growing. As these two factors converge, the language of online marketing will transform.

Those silly Vikings. They just couldn’t get to grips with the complexity of old English. So what did they do? They changed it completely.

They got rid of the genders, altered tough-to-remember tenses, and began pronouncing words with simpler sounds.

The English that resulted after 200 years of the Vikings’ tampering is the English we know and love today. It’s practically a different language.

The same thing is happening today, only instead of in one confined area, it’s happening in many places all over the world. The English language is diverging, and we could be witnessing the stratification of the language of the world into four, five or more different languages.

And if we thought language evolved quickly with the Vikings, the advent of online and mobile communication will only serve to speed up the process.

But how is it changing? Where will it split, and how will it develop? What will this mean for global online communication?

First let’s look briefly at the history of English to get an idea of where it’s come from.

Very Brief History of the English Language

The English language’s roots can be traced to Anglo-Saxon dialects around 1500 years ago. By the Middle Ages, English had evolved into something loosely resembling the English we know today.

The first English-speaking colony was North America in the 1600s. However, the English that developed across the Atlantic differed from British English. The Americans pronounced their “r”s differently, and invented new words. When the US became independent a century later, the sense of who “owned” the correct version of the language became blurred.

Similarly, different dialects of English began to develop in other new British colonies in places like Africa, India, and Australia. Most people in Africa and India learned English as a second language.

In India, English became firmly established as the language of administration and the social elite. After independence, English was meant to be phased out, but there was no single language to replace it.

Until the end of the First World War, British English was the most commonly used version of English. The turning point occurred when the Americans insisted that the Treaty of Versailles be written in both French and English (instead of just French). Thereafter, American English was exported worldwide.

What Happens Next?

The number of people who speak English as a second language vastly outnumbers those who are native speakers. Indeed, by 2020, it’s predicted that only 15 percent of English speakers will be natives.

This has many speculating on how English will evolve. Will it begin to sound less like English, and more like a hybrid of, for example, Chinese-English?

It’s estimated that around 300 million Chinese read and write English. Often, however, this version of English is quite different from the one spoken in England.

Linguist and English language specialist, Dr. Barbara Allen, explains that the Chinese find English very difficult to learn. This has partly to do, she says, with the fact that there are no articles (a, the) in the Chinese language.

class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">And it’s not only what these speakers might leave out, but what might be added in. Tone, for one, may be introduced into Chinese-English. Tone is used extensively in Asian languages and can often make the difference between many different meanings to a word.

Some predict that this, among other factors, could cause the English spoken in China, India, and other parts of the world, to develop into a version of English not comprehensible to native British English speakers.

Local English
In spite of all these different strains of English developing, there remains a need for a language of global communication. Dr. Allen says she suspects what may happen is the development of “local Englishes” all over the world, alongside an “international English,” which will act as a lingua franca for purposes of business, trade and cross-border online communication.

However, “local English” is likely to be the version that more people are comfortable with, and they will revert to it whenever possible.

This “local English” is the result of the different cultural adaptations to English around the globe.

You’ve probably heard of it. It takes the form of “Hinglish” in India, “Chinglish” in China, and “Spanglish” in Spain.

While these local Englishes may seem odd and wrong to native English speakers, they will actually play a very important role in the development of the English language.

The Chinglish Web

Increasingly, these hybrid versions of English are migrating online. This results in a high amount of search on hybrid keywords. For example, there is a high volume of search in China on the term “mba课程,” which is MBA combined with the Chinese symbol for “course”. Similarly, there is a high volume of Chinese search on the term “VIP旅行,” which translates to “VIP travel” in English.

And it’s not only in Chinese that this is happening. Russians will search in their native Cyrillic, but will often spell out the non-latin script using roman phonetics in the search bar.
These unique linguistic search behaviours will shape how the internet develops. Websites targeting these cultures will have to conform to meet their language needs, as they come online in hordes. It will not be the other way around.

This is actually good news for international marketers. The good news is that as yet, there is low competition for these hybrid keywords. Websites that act now to optimise for the new versions of hybrid English that are developing will be the winners.

And those who write their webpage content with the Oxford English dictionary best take a lesson from the Vikings: cultures do not adapt to suit a language; they adapt the language to suit them.

English will invariably change and those who do not change with it will be left behind.


About Oban Multilingual

Oban Multilingual is an expert in multilingual SEO and international SEM. With offices in over 26 countries worldwide, the company is unique in being able to offer expert localised search strategies for a number of multinational companies. For more information visit: http://www.obanmultilingual.com/

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